So long, farewell: Amazon “sells out” of Kindle Fires

No more Fires—until next week, when Amazon launches its next-gen model.

"Kindle Fire is sold out," stated Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO, on Thursday. And he doesn't appear to mean "we're getting a new shipment in next week"—instead, the first-generation Fire has been extinguished altogether, with an expected new product launch scheduled for next week.

Amazon announced the 7-inch Kindle Fire in November 2011 with much fanfare, and the device enjoyed a good holiday sales run with four million units sold in the month of December. Five months later, it was the number one Android tablet according to comScore. The device never quite hit all the right marks—it was clunky and slow, running an unpolished fork of Android 2.2—but it was also inexpensive and marketed heavily by Amazon.

The arrival of Google's impressive Nexus 7 tablet has only highlighted the shortcomings of the original Kindle Fire. After apparently running through its final production run in the ramp-down before the (presumed) new Fire reveal next week at an airplane hangar in Santa Monica—which we will live-blog—Amazon simply won't have any more Fires for sale until the new models become available.

Rumors suggest that both a 7-inch Kindle Fire replacement—as well as a larger 10-inch version of the device—could debut at the event, just in time for the holidays.

"We have an exciting roadmap ahead," Bezos said. "We will continue to offer our customers the best hardware, the best prices, the best customer service, the best cross-platform interoperability, and the best content ecosystem.”

Promoted Comments

Looking forward to seeing the Amazon reaction to the Nexus 7. If anyone is good at spending and losing money it's Bezos. Every time Amazon accidentally makes a profit he usually fixes it shortly and I don't think he's going to like watching Google lose more money per device than he is. The result may be a pretty good device.

142 posts | registered Apr 16, 2009

Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston

Looking forward to seeing the Amazon reaction to the Nexus 7. If anyone is good at spending and losing money it's Bezos. Every time Amazon accidentally makes a profit he usually fixes it shortly and I don't think he's going to like watching Google lose more money per device than he is. The result may be a pretty good device.

The device never quite hit all the right marks—it was clunky and slow, running an unpolished fork of Android 2.2—but it was also inexpensive and marketed heavily by Amazon.

I guess I missed that... The fire remains the most used device at my house... I guess I did not drink the right kool-aid for this article...

Same here. The Fire has worked very well for me. Streaming from Amazon Prime just works. Loading my own videos to it over USB is no problem. Plenty of Android apps available, at least nothing I ever looked for wasn't there. Ebooks work, but then I use my Kindle Keyboard for ebooks.

I honestly don't see a reason not to just keep using the Fire I have until it breaks. Then I might upgrade to whatever Fire they have available at the time, but they'd really have to have some incredible "wow!" feature on the Fire2 to get me to upgrade anytime soon.

I never bought the Fire. I have friends and coworkers who love them. I did buy a Nexus 7, and I like it, but rarely need it for anything. I have a Kindle Touch (that replaced my broken Kindle Keyboard) for reading.

The arrival of Google's impressive Nexus 7 tablet has only highlighted the shortcomings of the original Kindle Fire.

While Casey doesn't like the Fire, it's a little unfair to ding it based on a new device, released nearly a year later, running multiple iterations newer OS software that was released after the Fire, and was designed specifically to copy the Fire's strengths and then out-do it on every other level. Of course the Nexus 7 is much better.

That said, I'm curious to see how Amazon responds to the Nexus 7, because they would seem to be at a large disadvantage vs. Google.

...but mostly, I'm hoping that whatever software update they release is backported to the original hardware.

Great run, first evidence that Android could survive in the tablet space. Curious if whatever its successor is will be as successful as the first one, given the impending arrival of the Surface...

A 7" tablet is a very different beast from a Surface. The real competitors are the Nexus 7 and the forthcoming iPad Mini.

Given their history with e-ink Kindles, my guess is that Amazon will compete by having a nice little device at a crazy $149 price point.

This is technically true, although I guess in my head I was thinking about the larger one mentioned in the article if indeed such a beast exists. I'm not really sure it makes sense for Amazon to enter that market, might be another Kindle DX type niche product...

Looking forward to seeing the Amazon reaction to the Nexus 7. If anyone is good at spending and losing money it's Bezos. Every time Amazon accidentally makes a profit he usually fixes it shortly and I don't think he's going to like watching Google lose more money per device than he is. The result may be a pretty good device.

This is part of why I like Bezos. Companies that build up massive stockpiles of cash are companies that are lacking imagination. MS's greatest gains in their cash pile were during periods of stagnation creatively, Apple and Google continue to build thiers which just makes me wonder. If you have tens of billions of dollars, and engineers aroudn the world who want to work for you creating new things, what does it say that you'd rather just earn interest on the money than put that cash to work for you actively?

Bezos is not out of ideas, and thats a good thing. Hope Apple, Google and so forth start coming up with ideas to spend down their cash stockpiles as well.

I love Amazon; if I was a fanboy for any tech company, it would probably be them. The Fire was pretty disappointing to me though - the price was nice but the device itself was weak. I ended up giving it to my mom so she could get her email when travels internationally.

I'm really hoping the next fire is something worth talking about and not just a well-marketed but poorly-specced device intended to sell content.

Looking forward to seeing the Amazon reaction to the Nexus 7. If anyone is good at spending and losing money it's Bezos. Every time Amazon accidentally makes a profit he usually fixes it shortly and I don't think he's going to like watching Google lose more money per device than he is. The result may be a pretty good device.

Ha. I read an article about that, actually. He runs Amazon on cash flow, by design, and constantly plows all profit back into infrastructure and product. His "goal" is to have enough cash to pay the bills for a month or two, and that's it.

I think the experience with the Fire isn't consistent. The one at my house was usable but it did lag frequently and perform slowly at times. The more I used Amazon's fork of Android the more I disliked it.

I hope the Fire 2 is much better in the touch sensitivity department. I really like my Fire and use it just about every day, but it's far from perfect. For example, selecting a single TV show episode in the Netflix app with the seasonal drop down can be a chore as I tap the little play button futilely until it finally loads.

While Casey doesn't like the Fire, it's a little unfair to ding it based on a new device, released nearly a year later, running multiple iterations newer OS software that was released after the Fire, and was designed specifically to copy the Fire's strengths and then out-do it on every other level. Of course the Nexus 7 is much better.

I think you might be misinterpreting the point of her statement. I read it as meaning that the Kindle Fire's technology is a bit long in the tooth, and it could use a replacement. The Nexus 7 made that fairly apparent with its newer technology and more feature-filled Android build. Consider that the Kindle Fire is almost a year old, which is pretty ancient for an Android device.

Amazon copied the Nook Color concept. If there's an earlier color-tablet-as-ereader I don't know of it, but it wouldn't have been tightly integrated into the reseller ecosystem like the Nook and Fire are.

B&N has been very good about issuing software updates to older hardware, and the Nexus devices should be easily upgradable. Hopefully Amazon will do the same and not orphan the original Fire users just because they have a new toy to sell.

This is part of why I like Bezos. Companies that build up massive stockpiles of cash are companies that are lacking imagination. MS's greatest gains in their cash pile were during periods of stagnation creatively, Apple and Google continue to build thiers which just makes me wonder. If you have tens of billions of dollars, and engineers aroudn the world who want to work for you creating new things, what does it say that you'd rather just earn interest on the money than put that cash to work for you actively?

Bezos is not out of ideas, and thats a good thing. Hope Apple, Google and so forth start coming up with ideas to spend down their cash stockpiles as well.

You seem to be under the impression that Amazon would be profitable if it wasn't pouring its money into new and exciting research.

Most of the reason Amazon isn't profitable is its pricing policies, which is exactly what the article and poster were suggesting. The reason Wall Street is so hot on Amazon in spite of its lack of profitability is that they know Amazon is pricing to kill off their competition and reap the profits later.

This is part of why I like Bezos. Companies that build up massive stockpiles of cash are companies that are lacking imagination. MS's greatest gains in their cash pile were during periods of stagnation creatively, Apple and Google continue to build thiers which just makes me wonder. If you have tens of billions of dollars, and engineers aroudn the world who want to work for you creating new things, what does it say that you'd rather just earn interest on the money than put that cash to work for you actively?

Bezos is not out of ideas, and thats a good thing. Hope Apple, Google and so forth start coming up with ideas to spend down their cash stockpiles as well.

You seem to be under the impression that Amazon would be profitable if it wasn't pouring its money into new and exciting research.

Most of the reason Amazon isn't profitable is its pricing policies, which is exactly what the article and poster were suggesting. The reason Wall Street is so hot on Amazon in spite of its lack of profitability is that they know Amazon is pricing to kill off their competition and reap the profits later.

Amazon has mostly been profitable since 2001. Last year it had a net income of $631 million on 48 billion in sales - 1.3% margins. In Q2 2012, it had a profit of $7 million - miniscule considering their sales, but not a loss.

There is some good evidence that they'll come in at a loss in Q3 2012 though. It will be interesting to see if they turn a profit overall this year.

Amazon copied the Nook Color concept. If there's an earlier color-tablet-as-ereader I don't know of it, but it wouldn't have been tightly integrated into the reseller ecosystem like the Nook and Fire are.

B&N has been very good about issuing software updates to older hardware, and the Nexus devices should be easily upgradable. Hopefully Amazon will do the same and not orphan the original Fire users just because they have a new toy to sell.

The Kindle Fire was nearly identical to the Blackberry Playbook. Check the original Ars review of the Fire:

I'm stoked as hell about the Fire and Nexus going head to head and forcing innovation and refinement in the cheap small tablet space; I travel semi-regularly for work and would love a tablet but I'm not willing to shell out 500+ for one and I don't want to bother with utter crap either. Get me one with 20+ gigs of storage (including expansion) so I can load my movies and music onto it, and make the hardware able to handle web surfing painlessly, and I'll be very happy.

This is part of why I like Bezos. Companies that build up massive stockpiles of cash are companies that are lacking imagination. MS's greatest gains in their cash pile were during periods of stagnation creatively, Apple and Google continue to build thiers which just makes me wonder. If you have tens of billions of dollars, and engineers aroudn the world who want to work for you creating new things, what does it say that you'd rather just earn interest on the money than put that cash to work for you actively?

Bezos is not out of ideas, and thats a good thing. Hope Apple, Google and so forth start coming up with ideas to spend down their cash stockpiles as well.

You seem to be under the impression that Amazon would be profitable if it wasn't pouring its money into new and exciting research.

Most of the reason Amazon isn't profitable is its pricing policies, which is exactly what the article and poster were suggesting. The reason Wall Street is so hot on Amazon in spite of its lack of profitability is that they know Amazon is pricing to kill off their competition and reap the profits later.

Have you actually read thier quarterly reports? I have. Yes, the big drain on their profits is investment/R&D. Its stated clearly in their reports, and Bezos has stated it repeatedly in interviews. If it is a lie, then the SEC will have to investigate because it is a crime to lie to your investors.

As for pricing policies, I'm not sure how that argument makes sense. You could say that *any* level of profit or loss for any company is a result of pricing policies. Its a non sequiter. Yes, they would make more if they charged more. They would lose if they charged less. Duh?

FAR more interested in new eink kindles. Hoping for touch with page turn buttons and improved contrast. If there's nothing but a light tacked on, I won't buy, but I doubt that will be the only improvement.

Looking forward to seeing the Amazon reaction to the Nexus 7. If anyone is good at spending and losing money it's Bezos. Every time Amazon accidentally makes a profit he usually fixes it shortly and I don't think he's going to like watching Google lose more money per device than he is. The result may be a pretty good device.

But at least Amazon should make a few cents on the new keyboard I just had to order.

Have you actually read thier quarterly reports? I have. Yes, the big drain on their profits is investment/R&D. Its stated clearly in their reports, and Bezos has stated it repeatedly in interviews. If it is a lie, then the SEC will have to investigate because it is a crime to lie to your investors.

Your assertion was that Amazon was using its profits on "engineers to build new things" unlike those crusty old companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple.

Amazon is pouring its money into distribution centers and content acquisition, as is the focus of those reports you refer to. And "Technology and Content" is only 8% of their spending anyways. No one is claiming Amazon are lying, only that you have interpreted their statements to fit your vision.

Looking forward to seeing the Amazon reaction to the Nexus 7. If anyone is good at spending and losing money it's Bezos. Every time Amazon accidentally makes a profit he usually fixes it shortly and I don't think he's going to like watching Google lose more money per device than he is. The result may be a pretty good device.

This is part of why I like Bezos. Companies that build up massive stockpiles of cash are companies that are lacking imagination. MS's greatest gains in their cash pile were during periods of stagnation creatively, Apple and Google continue to build thiers which just makes me wonder. If you have tens of billions of dollars, and engineers aroudn the world who want to work for you creating new things, what does it say that you'd rather just earn interest on the money than put that cash to work for you actively?

Bezos is not out of ideas, and thats a good thing. Hope Apple, Google and so forth start coming up with ideas to spend down their cash stockpiles as well.

This type of generalization is simply not true.

Many times it is prudent for companies to not spend their profit on R&D or new products for new markets. Being successful with current products does not always translate to proficiency at other products. Attempting to grow too quickly or enter new markets is one of the quickest ways to drive a successful company into the ground.

Often overlooked things include: capacity of current facilities and if larger facilities would require moving or splitting the current workforce. Corporate culture. Growing too quickly can destroy the culture from which the success came. Etc...

Have you actually read thier quarterly reports? I have. Yes, the big drain on their profits is investment/R&D. Its stated clearly in their reports, and Bezos has stated it repeatedly in interviews. If it is a lie, then the SEC will have to investigate because it is a crime to lie to your investors.

Your assertion was that Amazon was using its profits on "engineers to build new things" unlike those crusty old companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple.

Amazon is pouring its money into distribution centers and content acquisition, as is the focus of those reports you refer to. And "Technology and Content" is only 8% of their spending anyways. No one is claiming Amazon are lying, only that you have interpreted their statements to fit your vision.

Or it could be that I listen to what Bezos says, I live near Seattle and have watched them triple thier office space in the past three years(with plans for three mega towers over the next couple years), and watched them snatch up any employee who will leave MS, Google, Apple, Netflix, etc. And yes, I have read thier reports.

You know whats funny about that 8% figure you are tossing around? Its nearly 3x their actual margins, and way above their profits. Without that spending they would be an enormously profitable company. Yes, a huge amount of thier spending goes towards fullfillment centers and supply chain. Thats a no-brainer given that is thier primary business. Now show me how much thier competitors spend on technology by comparison as a percentage of thier expenditures. Wal*Mart? Target? Barnes & Noble? The only companies that likely exceed them are the pure technology companies like MS, Google, Apple, etc. But then that is thier entire business.

Looking forward to seeing the Amazon reaction to the Nexus 7. If anyone is good at spending and losing money it's Bezos. Every time Amazon accidentally makes a profit he usually fixes it shortly and I don't think he's going to like watching Google lose more money per device than he is. The result may be a pretty good device.

This is part of why I like Bezos. Companies that build up massive stockpiles of cash are companies that are lacking imagination. MS's greatest gains in their cash pile were during periods of stagnation creatively, Apple and Google continue to build thiers which just makes me wonder. If you have tens of billions of dollars, and engineers aroudn the world who want to work for you creating new things, what does it say that you'd rather just earn interest on the money than put that cash to work for you actively?

Bezos is not out of ideas, and thats a good thing. Hope Apple, Google and so forth start coming up with ideas to spend down their cash stockpiles as well.

This type of generalization is simply not true.

Many times it is prudent for companies to not spend their profit on R&D or new products for new markets. Being successful with current products does not always translate to proficiency at other products. Attempting to grow too quickly or enter new markets is one of the quickest ways to drive a successful company into the ground.

Often overlooked things include: capacity of current facilities and if larger facilities would require moving or splitting the current workforce. Corporate culture. Growing too quickly can destroy the culture from which the success came. Etc...

All of the downsides you mention are a function of poor management. Yes, they are real and they are issues, but that is why you want good managers. None of those things are inevitable.

The device never quite hit all the right marks—it was clunky and slow, running an unpolished fork of Android 2.2—but it was also inexpensive and marketed heavily by Amazon.

I guess I missed that... The fire remains the most used device at my house... I guess I did not drink the right kool-aid for this article...

Two users in my house seem to like it. I still enjoy my normal Kindle Reader myself. I'd not seen a reason why I needed to upgrade. I am curious to see how this next version turns out and what it offers. Maybe I'll consider upgrading.

And yet it's still US-only. At this point it's just pathetic. Meanwhile the Nexus 7 is available (mostly) worldwide. Get your fucking act together, Amazon.

You can't lay the blame for that entirely at their feet. If the Fire's primary purpose is to be an audio/video media consumption gateway to the Amazon store, it doesn't make much sense selling it in regions that would only have access to e-books. It is less of an issue for the the Nexus 7 which is marketed as a general purpose tablet that revolves around Google services.